James Whiteford, a 28-year veteran of the Edwardsville Fire Department — who’s led the city’s response to a number of major emergencies in the past four years — retired Friday.
Whiteford, 55, who’d been the top firefighter in the Metro East town since July 2020 and also served as the city’s emergency management coordinator, said he’s thankful for his coworkers and his family supporting him during his career.
“I don't have any regrets. It's been quite a quite a ride,” Whiteford said. “It's been crazy at times, and we've had a lot of calls that were significant. We've accomplished a lot of good things for the department and for the community.”
In addition to overseeing the city’s response to a 2021 tornado that killed six people and flattened an Amazon warehouse, Whiteford ran the department during the COVID-19 pandemic and an oil spill in early 2022.
“It was an eventful time in the history of the department,” he said.
A year after the tornado, the chief said he’d seen tornadoes touch down in and around Edwardsville before. However, they were fairly small and had limited damage.
“It is traumatic to deal with something like that,” Whiteford said in December 2022 around the one-year anniversary of the tornado. “I don’t mean that in a way that’s over the top and super emotional, but it does have an impact on you.”
Some of the city firefighters worked on the piles of rubble to pull out Amazon employees for six hours, he said.
More than 50 law enforcement and first responding agencies flocked to the scene, which presented radio communication challenges.
Whiteford and his team didn’t have the ability to communicate with all those agencies. Plus, many of the radio units were old, and their batteries died. Since then, those older units have all been replaced.
The lesson from those events, he said, is that the department and city could figure out what went wrong and how to make things better the next time.
Whiteford has served as an expert on a task force commissioned by the Illinois General Assembly studying warehouse safety after the 2021 tornado. The task force is inching closer to making recommendations.
The Florida native started with Edwardsville in 1995 as a volunteer firefighter. By 1996, he’d been recruited to start as full time as a firefighter and paramedic. Whiteford rose through the ranks of the department and was appointed chief 24 years later.
“I always thought that I wouldn't become the actual chief of the department, unless it was just the right time with the right people — that kind of situation,” he said. “And ultimately, that's what happened.”
In retirement, Whiteford said he’s looking forward to spending a little more time woodworking, a favorite hobby of his. And he hopes to take a camper he and his wife purchased two years ago on longer road trips.
“Those are my two immediate goals,” he said. “And after that, we'll have to see what life brings.”
